kennelco film diary

(1926) dir. Lotte Reiniger
viewed: 07/13/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

My final film of the Silent Film Festival is the classic, brilliant, wonderful animated film by Lotte Reiniger, The Adventures of Prince Achmed.  It is truly an amazing film, something I doubt that most people have seen the likes of.

Reiniger used an unusual format for her animations.  She cut out cardboard figures of great detail, jointed them, and pixilated their movement by shooting the film frame by frame (the latter part is the definition of animation, frame by frame manipulation/image creation).  So, the film is a shadow puppet show, a visual form of storytelling steeped in history throughout many cultures, but not something many modern audiences would be familiar with, I would expect.  The animation is sublime, moving the figures and the narrative along in a strange ever-morphing pace, while the backgrounds, designed in color, contrast with the figures and landscape.  It’s indescribable.

Reiniger was friendly with other artists working in non-representational animation like Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger, and her style and designs show this.  The film is far more close to their avant-garde works than it is to the films the Walt Disney would become famous for.

This film is the oldest known surviving feature-length animated film and it’s one of the most beautiful and amazing films that I have ever seen.  It was tremendous to see it on the big screen.  The kids, my son and his friend, Samantha, both enjoyed it, though Felix seemed to lag part of the way through.  This might have been due to his tiredness.  But since seeing it, they have both expressed having liked it very well.  It’s not an easy film for kids who are used to more traditional “cartoon” animation, but if they can, it is well worth their time.  It is well worth anyone’s time.  It’s totally amazing.

(1927) dir. Tod Browning
viewed: 07/12/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

The second film in my Silent Film Festival double feature was another great film from director Tod Browning and Star Lon Chaney, Sr.  The director and star made 10 films together in total.  A couple of years back I caught The Unholy Three (1925) in my first Silent Film Festival attendence, which was good, but The Unknown was considerably more impressive in its outlandish, outre weirdness, all part of the appeal of Browning’s work, as well as Chaney’s.

The Unknown is set in a small circus, featuring Chaney as an armless knife thrower and sharp-shooter and a young a beautiful Joan Crawford as his scantily-clad assistant.  In the first of many amazing sequences, Chaney not only throws knives at her with his feet, but uses a rifle to shoot off her clothing!  Chaney is in love with Crawford, the daughter of the circus master, but Crawford, in another huge element of Freudian craziness, is pathologically afraid of men’s hands.  Chaney tricks her other pursuer, the circus strongman into trying to get fresh with her, causing him to be violently shunned.

But, as it turns out, Chaney is faking his armlessness.  He’s a wanted man, hiding out in the circus.  But his armlessness is the thing that attracts Crawford to him, the only man who she does not fear.  Chaney, mad with love and realizing that if she found out that he actually had upper limbs would reject him, decides to actually become armless.  No hands, no pathological fear.  No groping!  No pawing!

The film’s bizarreness is its charm.  It’s a massively Freudian literalization of sexual fears, prowess, and negation.  And it’s totally entertaining as well.  Chaney sneers like no one else.  Some of his facial reactions to turns of events are totally alive and powerful.  And some of the footwork he does (though I have read that he had a truly armless stand-in for some shots) is amazing.  You can see the direction that Browning is moving in, toward his masterpiece, Freaks (1932).  He’s wild.

It was great to see this film with a huge audience, riding the reactions to the innuendos and plot twists.  Long live the Silent Film Festival!

(1928) dir. Paul Leni
viewed: 07/12/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

Silent film has become an increasing interest for me, as anyone who might read this may have assumed, or anyone who has spoken with me probably knows.  So, I was excited by the coming of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which ran all weekend at the Castro Theatre and showed many excellent films, restored and adored.  This was actually the most films I have seen for the festival, though I have now attended for the past 3 years.  For Saturday night, I had the double feature of The Man Who Laughs and the Lon Chaney/Tod Browning film, The Unknown (1927), a good paired billing of the bizarre and melodramatic.

For The Man Who Laughs, I’d mostly been familiar with the freakish grimace/grin and the look of star Conrad Veidt, whose physical appearance and image most notably inspired the character and design of the Batman nemesis, The Joker.  It’s almost a straight-up rip-off physically.  But, being unfamiliar with the Victor Hugo story from which the film was adapted, nor really even the content of the narrative, I had assumed that the character was a villain.  While I couldn’t have been more wrong, it ties right into the truly strange effect the make-up and visage of Veidt’s character, Gwynplaine, has in his freakish joker face, hiding the gentle, noble soul beneath the surface.

The film has a bizarre enough beginning.  King Henry II of England and his evil court jester, Barkilphedro, kill a noble who has opposed the king and send his son to the “comprachicos”, a fictionalized band of gypsies who steal children, mutilate them through surgery or other means to turn them into circus freaks, to do with what they will.  Gwynplaine is then abandoned by the comprachicos, but now and for the rest of his days to wear a grotesque, humongous smile.

But Gwynplaine is noble, rescues a blind baby from its dead mother and is taken in by a traveller who raises them and utilizes Gwynplaine at “the man who laughs”, a sideshow freak, and a very popular one.  The story’s intrigue develops as his true heritage is made known to the Queen of England and others, and the evils and machinations of the royalty and priveledged nearly destroys our hero and his life and that of his beloved.

Directed by Paul Leni, the film has a wonderful aesthetic and art design.  Conrad Veidt is brilliant as the permanently grimacing “clown”, adding a working pathos and truly appealing sympathy.  While the film in many ways is a societal critique, its bases in the darker corners of culture and the appeal of gruesomeness is strange and perhaps somewhat sublime.  The film is quite brilliant, a strange and wonderful darkness, sadness, and beauty.

(2008) dir. Eric Brevig
viewed: 07/12/08 at Century San Francisco Centre, SF, CA

A significant contrast for me this week or two is going to see the Hollywood of today’s current output in contrast to the films shown at the Silent Film Festival going on this weekend at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco.  For me, taking my son to see this film, shot and marketed as  Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D, I thought that the contrast to going to the showing tomorrow (today) of Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) which I am taking him and his friend to tomorrow, would be an interesting thing, for me, for them.

It was kinda fun.

Felix, my son, got a headache from the glasses/experience and didn’t enjoy it one iota (so he told me, though I think he liked it a bit).  My daughter, 4 year-old Clara, sat on my lap, trying to grab raindrops, flying incandescent birds, mist, steam, all sorts of stuff.  For me, within the context of this film and in general, 3-D is much more “thrill ride”-like, than important to a cohesive narrative experience.  I mean, the yo-yo has little narrative importance, but it gets thrust in our faces because it’s a convenient protusion rather than a convenient plot point.

Basically though, I enjoyed the film in the moment.  It’s stupid, it’s got Brendan Fraser (who has made his career in these types of films) and it’s full of entertaining if yet totally obviously unbelievable digital animation in giant carnivorous plants, flying phirraha fish, giant sea monsters, dinosaurs, bad science….. but it’s not worth complaining on those fronts.  It’s simply a thrill ride.  How is this film as a thrill ride?

It’s satisfactory on that experience.  As a film on its own, it’s much less satisfying.  For today, it’s better and more fun than it will be in years and technological experiences yet to come.

The only sad point is that Jules Verne deserves much better, in today’s times, even when contextualizing him in Victorian aesthetics and scientific knowledge.  Verne was very inventive, forward thinking, and a good story-teller.  This film tries to acknowledge that, but more on the side of saying that his cockamamie sci-fi of 100 years ago was actual knowledge, actual reality. 

Okay.  Not so cool.

But it was a decent little trip downtown. 

(1925) dir. Charles Chaplin
viewed: 07/11/08

For those 1 or 2 of you that actually read this blog on a regular basis, you know that I am showing both my children and some friends of theirs silent film comedy classics.  It’s been one of the most worthwhile experiments of my life.  Showing the kids the films is one thing, but I read the intertitles to them, explain certain historical or cultural anachronisms, and occasionally help explain the narrative.  The kids have loved it.  Sitting on the couch, talking them through it, hearing their roars of laughter at great, wonderful films made a distance in time that is closing in on a century, I can’t really fully express how amazing the experience of watching these films has been for me.  I enjoy it more than I would on my own, more than I would in an audience of anonymous film fans, more, in some ways,…than anything.

Mostly, we’ve watched Buster Keaton films (The General (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)), which I think I prefer.  But I thought it would be worthwhile to expand to the other masters of silent film comedy, going with Charlie Chaplin, the perhaps more iconic master and going with one of his best-known, best-appreciated films.  Initially, the kids thought that they would prefer Buster Keaton, but as soon as the film got going, it went beautifully.

For me, The Gold Rush is deeply iconic, with the scene of Chaplin eating his shoe for Thanksgiving dinner, the wonderful dance he performs with the forks in the dinner rolls, the scene of the cabin teetering on the brink of disaster.

I also remember my first introduction to this film.  It was in fourth grade, for reasons that I cannot remember, a kid’s father who was a film professor at UF came in and showed us this film…again, I don’t recall the circumstances exactly.  It made an immediate impression.  It’s great stuff.  It is cinema.  It’s the most impressive stuff that you can show anyone.

Frankly, I am still more impressed with Keaton than Chaplin, but that may be a sort of film school prejudice.  But of my recent experience and you can look back through this blog for my Chaplin experiences (Modern Times (1936) and City Lights (1931)…okay I helped you with hyperlinks there).  But the bottom line for me is that I am totally fucking into silent film.  It’s a beautiful and diminishingly cultural significance that retains a wonder in experience that has a value beyond anything one can imagine.

I tell you, if you have a chance to expose young people, children, to these films, it could be one of the most wonderful experiences of your life.  For you with the film, for you with the kids, for the kids with these films that are so amazing and significant, so far removed from today.  I hope that these things embed themselves in a meaningfulness for their future lives.  I can’t imagine that they will fail to have an effect in their ultimate knowledge and appreciation of things.

I was saying to someone that I feel almost smug about showing the kids these films.  I say that just because I enjoy it so much, I think it’s cool, I think it will develop and influence them in subtle, yet telling ways, so different from the average child of this era. 

You can think I am a stupid jerk for saying this, but I love watching these films with my kids.  I love watching these films on my own, but with them it’s so much better.

Hey, if you haven’t seen Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, it’s your missing piece.  Fill it in if you can, on your own, with a kid, an adult, a retiree.  It emanates from a time that is diminishing in our cultural history.  Yet, it is an art as profound as anything.  See it.

(2007) dir. Yung Chang
viewed: 07/08/08 at Opera Plaza Cinemas, SF, CA

I was somewhat disappointed with the documentary Up the Yangtze.  I didn’t care for some of its techniques and found it kind of boring at times, despite the fact that I have developed a keen interest in the subject matter, the Three Gorges Dam project in China, the largest hydro-electric project on Earth and its effect on the people, the environment, and its symbolism and impact on China and the world.  As I was sitting in the theater, I was thinking to myself that I was probably the only person that I know that was actually excited about seeing Up the Yangtze, or perhaps even knew about it.  It had gotten good reviews in a lot of places.  I didn’t think it was all that good.

Made by Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang, the film starts with the director’s voice-over about a trip that he is taking with his grandfather on a luxury liner “up the Yangtze”, a ride that is one of reflection for the older man, having grown up in the area, seeing the change.  It’s also a culture shock of the change, the scale of change and the effects that it has on a couple of specific families and individuals.  “Personalized” documentaries aren’t my favorite approach to film, but Chang actually doesn’t even stick with it.  His personal story is only partial and despite opening the narrative, ends up only being a piece of the picture, and not a well-integrated piece.

The majority of the film follows a family that is desperately poor.  Relocated from their initial home in a city that is now a ghost city, abandoned and deconstructed and soon to be underwater, the father had been a coolie or rickshaw runner.  When they were moved out, he and his wife built a shack on the side of the Yangtze and started growing their own food.  But this shack is not long for the land and air, it also is in an area that will be flooded as the dam nears completion.  Their story also follows their daughter, who wants to go to high school but has to take a job, as she winds up working on one of the luxury cruise liners that go up and down the river and the culture shock between their abject poverty and the tourist industry right in front of them.

My problem with the following of this family is that some of the scenes seem staged.  I say this based on camera angles and certain shots that seem so implausible as some of the family drama unfolds.  

There is a lot to take stock of in the film, but I don’t feel the film really acted strongly in drawing some of these more dramatic contrasts and changes.  The ghost city where the family began is eerie and odd and a shocking contrast to the neon glowing city that has been constructed on the other side of the river, modern, glowing, Vegas-like against the beauty of the sloping hills and mountains.  The family that Chang follows is a striking story, showing how much of an outcast some of the peasants are just in their being.  Some of the people that Chang talks to offer their feelings toward the government and its role in the lives and decisions made that are so dramatically changing the landscape.  It’s a myriad of opinion.

The fact is that this is an amazing construct, this dam.  It represents the vastness of power of the government in China and the technological and industrial power of the country.  The landscape itself, the Three Gorges, are vast and beautiful themselves, and while the river is often brown, its majesty and power and history are dramatic. 

But oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), I found director Zhang ke Jia’s Still Life (2006), a narrative film set against this change and landscape, much more compelling.  Because Chang takes such a narrative approach with the poor family, the contrast may not be so stark.  Besides, Zhang’s films have a documentary-like approach to the landscape and the evolving history.  Still Life featured some amazing images or desolate towns being torn down, people living amidst signage of doom (soon to be flooded) areas.  Though both films inhabit the region and the culture, Still Life even with its weird surrealistic moments, used its visual imagery to a stronger extent.

I don’t know why I was so bothered by the inconsistencies in Chang’s Up the Yangtze, but it felt like a less sophisticated piece of filmmaking.  Not that it’s bad, just that I was hoping for more.

(2004) dir. Fatih Akin
viewed: 07/07/08

In reading about director Fatih Akin’s latest film to be released in the States, The Edge of Heaven (2007), I became interested in seeing Head-On, which I hadn’t really noted when it came out.

It’s an interesting film, a good film.  I’m still absorbing it and trying to put it in perspective. 

Set in Hamburg, Germany, Head-On is the story of two Turkish Germans who meet in a hospital following suicide attempts.  Cahit is an aging rocker type, deeply alcoholic, who drives his car right into a building, a straight-up metaphor for his approach to life.  Sibel, played by the gorgeous Sibel Kekilli, is a young woman who wants to live life but is held in cultural bondage by her traditional family, a family who is more concerned with what her suicide would mean culturally for their family rather than what it would mean emotionally.  Sibel talks Cahit into marrying her to free her from this, so that she can “fuck anybody she wants”, which for her is an aspect of freedom.

Their is an air of Jim Jarmusch to the film, maybe more in the people rather than the film’s tone.  It’s certainly not as spartan and quiet or slow as Jarmusch, but you can feel a bit of Stranger Than Paradise (1984) in their oddball relationship.  Of course, it evolves significantly.

The film is very much about the cultural situation of Turkish Germans, both within their own culture, their relationships to modern Western culture and their own identity.  Sibel is steeped in traditional Turkish culture even though she was actually born in Germany.  She strives for the freedom to be herself and discover that.  Cahit, on the other hand, is already where Sibel wants to be, but crushed by the death of his first wife, he has become a complete nihilist.  Sibel awakens Cahit’s sense of himself, his sense of his culture.  Though he was born in Turkey, his Turkish has become poor and he doesn’t know how to inhabit the world of the Turks.  He hates it.

I don’t know exactly, it’s all worlds that are new to me.  But the characters are compelling.  I liked the film.